View: New Zealand's Amy Satterthwaite has broken a glass ceiling in women's cricket

Last week when New Zealand’s Satterthwaite became first cricketer to get paid maternity leave, world took a step towards women cricketers having ‘normal’ careers.

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Aug 29, 2019, 07.55 AM IST

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Satterthwaite, 32, is in her physical prime, captain of her country, and ranked the second best batter in the world in ODIs. And none of that has restricted her from doing what is right by herself and her family.

By Snehal Pradhan

Sarah Elliot, Arran Brindle, even Neha Tanwar. These are the exceptions to the rule. The crazy ones. The ones who show it’s possible to play cricket for your country even after having a baby. Now, New Zealand captain Amy Satterthwaite is taking a break from cricket to have her first child, and aims to return to the national team. It sounds like one more name on the list.

Except that her case is nothing like the others.

The first three are a part of cricketing maternal folklore; Elliot scored an Ashes century nine months after having her first son, using the lunch and tea breaks to express-pump breast milk. Brindle, an Englishwoman, took a break from the game in her mid-twenties, had a child, but continued to play top-flight men’s League cricket recreationally. She eventually worked her way back into the national team and played for another three years. Tanwar, who plays for Delhi, returned to cricket six months after giving birth, and shed the 20 kilos she gained to fight back into national contention, getting into the India ‘A’ side.

But none of them had a child while they were playing for the national team; none of them could have imagined it possible. And that is why Satterthwaite’s pregnancy is different.

The announcement last week that Satterthwaite would take a break to have a baby with wife and teammate Lea Tahuhu was significant. It came just a few days after new professional contracts for the women’s team were agreed upon. Satterthwaite will receive her full contract, despite not being available to train or play for most of its tenure. And so the happy chapter for Satterthwaite and Tahuhu (as they prepare to welcome ‘Baby Satterhuhu’) has also become the first step towards female cricketers having ‘normal’ careers.

I say normal because many believe that women cannot have it all: the honour of representing your country in the game you love, the companionship of a supportive partner, and the freedom to start a family at the time of your choosing. Satterthwaite, 32, is in her physical prime, captain of her country, and ranked the second best batter in the world in ODIs. And none of that has restricted her from doing what is right by herself and her family.

It may be a decade before Indian cricket sees something like this become our normal, but at least it is a visible reality elsewhere. For now it is hard to imagine a Harmanpreet Kaur or Poonam Yadav taking a year from their careers to have a child because the systemic support structures that would allow them to move past the professional and financial insecurities do not exist.

As young girls taking up the sport, it was implicit that if we wanted to stay the course, sacrifices had to be made. Children would have to wait until after our playing days, whenever that was, and that reality meant shorter careers for some of us. For most of those who chose to pursue a goal as sacrosanct as playing for the country, it demanded the best years of our bodies. And once you’re there, you can’t think of it as a job from which you take leave; it’s a privilege, and rightly so. To the point where thinking about doing it while also wanting a family or children may invite questions about commitment and priorities.

In the book The Fire Burns Blue, a history of Indian women’s cricket by Karunya Keshav and Sidhanta Patnaik, the authors write, “It (the fact that there were very few active cricketers after marriage and/or children) seemed a dismaying indictment of a culture that forced women to be one thing or another. A sportsperson or a married woman.”

Slowly but irrevocably, like an iceberg melting, this is now changing. Other sports like tennis are evolving too; after Serena Williams’ ranking fell to 453 when she stopped playing while pregnant, the WTA now protects the ranking of a player who takes a break to have a child. Considering cricket, as a largelyskill based sport, is not unfriendly to women returning from pregnancy, the coming years will see further evolution in the wordings of women’s contracts all over the world. As Karunya and Patnaik note, “Like any 21st century workplace, the BCCI needs to be prepared with a progressive pregnancy policy and have maternity leave policy in place.”

(The writer is a former Indian cricketer)

(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this column are that of the writer. The facts and opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of www.economictimes.com.)